I’ll be there for you

Linda Bongiorno
Tuesday 19 April 2022

Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 24:1-12

 

How do you follow the Hallelujah Chorus?

So no-one told you life was gonna be this way

Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA

It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear,

When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year…

But, this is not an episode of F·R·I·E·N·D·S.  We’re not in New York, you’re undoubtedly brighter than Joey, and these pews are not as comfy as the sofa in Central Perk.  This is not The One with the Resurrection.  Or is it?

Because the theme song might just describe most of the lives we’ve lived in recent times.  No one told us life was going to be derailed for two years by a global pandemic, with a cost of living crisis to follow.  Maybe the song should be:

So no-one told you life was gonna be this way

Your wifi’s broke, it’s cold, no friends in DRA…

Maybe that’s what led to how we responded in the Chaplaincy, on 15 March 2020 with the first Companionship email.  We were looking for a way to counteract the isolation of the lockdown, with people told to stay at home, students stuck in their rooms, staff and alumni no longer going out to work.  The opposite of isolation seemed to us to be companionship, and so began a daily email to the Chaplaincy mailing list and blogpost for three months which still continues from time to time.  Little did we know then that, over two years later, face-coverings are still mandatory in much of Scotland, at least until tomorrow, and that there are still laws on self-isolation, which Sam and I have been following over the past two weeks.

But friendship mattered long before the coronavirus.  Over the past eleven years in which I’ve listened to students share in confidence the deepest troubles they face, it’s been clear to me how important friendship is.  I’d say people talk much more about friends than partners.  It’s friends who help us negotiate life, deal with that random 11.5, share that Saturday morning hangover, laugh at the foibles of lecturers and library crushes.

A priest in the East End of London once rightly said,

The highest privilege is being allowed to share another’s pain.  You talk about your pleasures to your acquaintances; you talk about your troubles to your friends.

And so when these friendships go awry, it can make everything seem that much darker.  Friendship – companionship – is often what makes it our day, our week, our month, or even our year.  As Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Ross and Rachel know.  This year’s Chaplaincy Prize called for creative entries with a faith or spiritual take on the theme of Friendship.  We had a number of brilliant entries, on friendships with each other, across the generations, with family members, with God, from a pig to a girl, and with a teddy bear.  The winning video By Kate Miller is still there to watch on the Chaplaincy webpages.

This Holy Week, brief addresses by Sam or me have focussed on friendship.  On Wednesday Sam explored Jesus’ friendship with Judas.  On Thursday we meditated on Jesus washing the feet of his friends, the disciples.  And on Good Friday, I explored Jesus’s friendship with the world found in the cross: how God turned the enmity of hostile humanity into forgiveness, into embrace.

Today, we see what that friendship means with Easter eyes.  Women came to the tomb that Sunday morning, three of whom are named by Luke – Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James.  They were Jesus’ friends, part of the group of disciples from Galilee to the north.  The women probably organised the group’s money, provisions and accommodation.  They listened to Jesus as he taught, and they followed him to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover.  On the day we know as Good Friday, they saw the crucifixion and Jesus’ death, watched as his body was taken down from the cross, and looked on as it was laid to rest in a new tomb by Joseph of Arimathea.  They spent the remaining time on Friday preparing spices to anoint his body at the first opportunity.  On the Sabbath – Saturday – they waited.

Then very early on Sunday morning, the women came to the tomb with the spices.  How were they feeling?  Surely much as those other friends on the road to Emmaus, who said, “We had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel.”  Mary Magdalene and her friends had hoped in Jesus, that he would make things better, that he would liberate their people from imperial control, that he would bring about a new normal, of fairness and harmony.

They had hoped that Isaiah’s vision which we heard earlier would become a reality:

when people would receive a proper reward for their efforts, in a house of their own, with food enough and to spare, with decent long lives, safety in childbirth for mother and baby, a world where neither lions nor human beings are predators, where the wicked receive their just deserts.

It doesn’t sound bad, does it?  But the women’s hopes had been dashed on the rock of Golgotha, killed on a Roman cross, victim of that collusion between secular and religious power we see wielded so cruelly 2000 years later in Moscow today.

We know how the gospel story goes now.  But these friends didn’t know until they found the tomb empty, and two strangers with their world-changing question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  Jesus is not here.  Your friend has risen.  He’ll be there for you.”

This is what Christians have celebrated for 2000 years, and what has been proclaimed in this chapel since 1460 by scholars, masters and doctors: that God is there for us in the Spirit of the risen Christ.

The world threw its absolute worst at this one human being: deceit and fake news, Pilate’s political expediency born of fear, Caiaphas’ religious duplicity excluding this new inclusive understanding; between them cruelty and humiliation, a judicial killing without just cause.

And, hallelujah, it did not work.  Rather than snuffing out this rumour of liberty, this community of love, earthly powers only brought a deeper love out of the depths – a power of love which turned enmity into friendship, crucifixion into embrace, death into life.  And Jesus remains alive, and is there for us.

What does that mean?

It means that God is there for us in the 11.5, and the 1.5 degrees Celsius we desperately hope is the limit of average temperature rise.

That God is there for us in our love life, and the life of those in Ukraine we’d dearly love to be saved.

That God is there for us when broke, when the rain starts to pour, when everything seems to be going wrong at the same time.

That God is there for us in the midst of illness and in the journey we will make beyond death into life eternal.

That God is there for us, in friends.

The image on the cover of the order of service is from three years ago, the last time we could gather on Easter morning for sunrise service before today.  It is an image of friends: Jesus is raised in friendship.

Christians believe in a friend who is closer than a sister or a brother, the friend the women came to anoint, the one who laid down his life for his friends, the friend who rose for the world.  There are times when we feel that risen presence giving us wisdom in decision-making, strength to face the future, hope when all seems lost.  Your mother warned you there’d be days like these, the song goes.  And if we didn’t know that before the pandemic, we do now.  Easter is the faith that God is there for us on days like these.

But explicitly religious experience can be rare.  It’s much easier to see the spirit of the risen Christ in our human lives.  In the scientists and campaigners who have brought climate change to the world’s attention.  In our University’s Rector Leyla Hussein, installed on Friday, the first black woman in the role.  In the countless people who have welcomed refugees from Kabul to Kyiv into their homes.  Jesus is raised in the friendship we give and receive:

 

I’ll be there for you…

When the rain starts to pour

I’ll be there for you…

Like I’ve been there before

I’ll be there for you…

‘Cause you’re there for me too.

Hallelujah!

 

END

Share this story


Leave a reply

By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website.